[iOS Recipe] No. 2 - Handy Shortcuts

 

Very often, I'm seeing on iPhone screens of the people around me this small faint black square superimposed on top.

And so I learned that some are afraid of spoiling their home buttons if they are pressed too many times.

Such virtual button will minimise the use of the physical home button, thereby prolong its lifespan.

But this black square is too distracting to me, especially when I'm playing games.

It seems that there's a neat trick that does the same thing without having the black square appearing.

Since iOS 8, widgets are supported in the Notification Centre.

There are many apps in the App Store that allows user to create shortcuts icons that appears in the Notification Centre widgets.

One of them is AirLaunch.

 

The app allows the user to add shortcuts to contacts, web urls, apps and "System Actions".

 

 

The user can choose from a variety of System actions and one of which is the "Home Button".

When the Home Button is selected, it will appear as an icon in the Notification widget.

So, whenever you are in an opened app or game and you want to exit out to the home screen, you just have to swipe down to bring up the Notification Centre and click on the "Home" icon.

That will bring you to home screen without pressing the physical home button.

There are other similar apps such as Go Launcher, etc.

I love these apps a lot and use them on a daily basis.

<- Back to [iOS Recipe] No. 1

[iOS Recipe] My Post-PC Era Begins

I haven't updated this blog in about two years now.  I'm gonna start this series of "iOS Recipe" articles showing you guys how I make use of iOS and my iDevices in my daily life.

To start off, I'm gonna announce the beginning of my "Post-PC Era" in my daily life.

 

I've took the plunge and got the 12.9" iPad Pro.  As I foresee I'll be keeping lots of videos and images on it, I've got the 128GB model.

Of course, an iPad Pro alone does not effectively makes me Post-PC.  So, I've got a few accessories to go along with it.

Here they are as shown in the picture.

 

Let's list them down here:

1. iPad Pro 12.9" 128GB
2. Foldable leather casing
3. Magnetic Bluetooth full size keyboard that comes with the foldable leather casing
4. 2-in-1 stylus with ball point pen
5. Mini Bluetooth speaker
6. iFlash Lightning micro SD card adaptor
7. CloudFTP WIFI wireless USB device
8. iPhone SE

With the above accessories, my use cases and needs are satisfied.

Here's the list of my use cases:

1. Big screen display that shows more content on a single screen (the 12.9" iPad)
2. Ease of text input (the Bluetooth keyboard)
3. Precise interaction with the touch screen (the stylus)
4. Music listening at close distance when the iPad is charging at a distance (the mini Bluetooth speaker)
5. Reading large document and streaming videos from micro SD card (the iFlash Lightning micro SD card adaptor)
6. Backing up documents to micro SD card (the iFlash Lightning micro SD card adaptor)
7. Reading large document and streaming videos from USB thumbdrive (the CloudFTP WIFI wireless USB device)
8. Whatsapping from the big screen iPad (the iPhone SE)

So far, a few days into my usage, I did not touch my Acer Windows 10 laptop at all.

To conclude, I can say I can very much depend totally on the iPad Pro and accessories to archive my daily PC tasks that I used to do with my Acer laptop.

But, I being a Software Engineer that does occasional coding stuff with Visual Studio for C# and Netbeans for Java programs, I will still need to fall back to my Acer laptop for those.

Here are the individual shots of the various accessories:

 

 

 

 

As for battery consumption:

I'm able to get 9 hours plus of usage after full charge with 23% of battery juice left.

Not bad at all.

 

 

That's it for my first post on [iOS Recipe].

Watch out this space for more tips and tricks that I've encountered and used in my daily life routine.

Note: This blog article is full written using the iPad Pro with the stylus and physically keyboard.